Transitive or Intransitive?

Did you ever do parsing at school? It is important for the clergy (and registrars) to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. As in "I am going to marry you in the morning." Done intransitively one has made binding oaths. Transitively one can marry dozens of people without affecting ones own status.

I was surprised to read that when RL Ashcroft wrote his history of Haileybury to 1961 he could note that there had only been to that date, two weddings in the Chapel. (Correctly they were by Archbishop's Special Licence.) There are now a few weddings  each year I think. Some years ago I married a contemporary of mine in the chapel. (Transitively!)

Tomorrow I have been persuaded by the youngest one to brave the crowds in town for the Royal Wedding. The two Haileyburians are moaning that the school is working through the bank holiday. In 1983 the Royal Wedding was in the holidays so the problem did not arise.

God Bless the  Royal Couple and all those others preparing for Holy Matrimony.

Lift Up Your Hearts

I was unaware until Humphrey Nye gave me a copy this week that RL Ashcroft wrote, in addition to Random Recollections of Haileybury, a book for those who had been confirmed. It is not a confirmation course, but a call to a deeper religion for those who have grown up in other ways but not found any deeper religious instruction. The following paragraphs are from the foreword.

I am sure that our chief need today is to get back to the vitality of the first Christian message - to a vivid belief that God is Love; that Christ, by virtue of His Cross and Resurrection, can save us from our lovelessness; that the Holy Spirit can thrill us and warm the dying embers of our love - we want to get hold of a message which will give us confidence and strength and enthusiasm, which will create in us a sense of fellowship one with another, which will make our personal lives sweet and holy and inspiring, and will finally send us out into the workaday world with a compelling song in our hearts so that others shall take notice of us that we have been with Jesus.

...

With Christ it is all or nothing. There is no such man as a nominal Christian. "The Christian life is the life of the First Christian, Jesus Christ, continued in the members of His mystical Body, the Catholic Church." [Bede Frost, The Art of Mental Prayer.]  And the basis of such a life is the conviction that there lived on this earth One who was divine as well as human, that some day, some how, we shall meet Him, and meanwhile we shall adore Him, and pray to Him, and allow His Spirit to move in us, and try to live like Him.

Haileyburia

Mrs Talbot at Speech day 1926

Some time in the 1920s the boys in the Lawrence House Room entered the flower box competition. They bought lots of good sees and planted up their box. But the flowers did not grow. There was some concern since there was a prize involved and they wanted to win. Their Housemaster investigated and their mistake was recorded in his Random Recollections which I have mentioned before. The problem was not so inattention but undue excitement: each day they dug the poor plants up to see how the roots were doing, with disastrous results for the health of the flowers. The prize was offered by the Master's wife, Mrs Talbot. She was described as 'the perfect Master's wife' and had her own flower border in the Master's Garden which was renowned for its beauty. Haileybury is still a place of many flowers.

Flowers in Quad 2010

Battle of Britain 2

On July 26 1930 JWC More (Th 24) passed out of Cranwell with, among others, Douglas Bader.  He died in 1944 as a Japanese Prisoner of War on a transport and is commemorated on column 431 of the Singapore Memorial. Fighting in France in 1940 he shared in shooting down a Heinkel 111. During the Battle of Britain he was in Leigh Mallory's 12 Group, Commanding 73 Squadron engaged in night fighting.

In Random Recollections RL Ashcroft states that More made the "pioneer deck landing (on the Courageous)." This cannot mean the first ever landing by an aircraft onto a ship. It may mean that More was involved in the trials in 1939 in which Spitfires without arrestor hooks were landed on HMS Courageous. This proved that it would be possible for the Fleet Air Arm to be equipped with better aircraft. The narrow undercarriage of the Spitfire made landing and take off especially difficult unless perfectly executed (operationally there were problems as they could not be lowered to the hangars of many of the carriers because of the wingspan). Nevertheless the experiments led to the development of the Seafire, the naval variant of the Spitfire.

The courage involved in landing a Spitfire with its narrow undercarriage and with no arrestor hook onto a moving ship is not to be underestimated.

Singing

Music has been an exceptional strength of Haileybury for many years. I have just got back from a three day parish pilgrimage to Walsingham. We had an afternoon out at Wells-next-the-Sea and I found in the second hand bookshop there a small volume published in 1889 called Songs Sung at Haileybury. The content is interesting, more on that another time; but the use is presumably that described in Random Recollections of Haileybury: 'Another use of Big School which has lapsed (1953) was "Upper School Singing" on Saturday nights, when the School collected with the old Haileybury Song Book to let off steam with community singing. To this sophisticated age such an entertainment may well savour of "Eric or Little by Little." But then, the cacophonous jazz records one now hears from study windows had not yet vitiated the standard of taste or or enjoyment.'

Hugo Bagnall-Oakeley (Ha 51.1-55.2) wrote today to remark on another musical entry in Random Recollections in which Ashcroft referred to "the exceptionally high standard of the 1954 house unison singing competition. I only realised later that this was the year Hailey won the competition and I was the director and conductor. The regulations provided that the entire house must take part—i.e. not just the good singers--- but I instructed those who couldn’t sing in tune to mime the words without making a sound. Incidentally our housemaster Killer Cook was distinctly unimpressed as he regarded musicians as long haired, limp wrested nancy boys but I managed to convince him that this was, after all, a team event so he grudgingly agreed to have the cup in Hailey, although he would much rather have won cock house rugger!"

What would Mr Cook have thought of Haileybury winning the BBC Choir of the year competition in 2005?


(PS you can buy one of the CDs by clicking here or on the picture of the Haileybury Coat of Arms at the bottom of the blog home page.)

Hard Times

I promised some more about RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury. It is a collection of articles for the Haileyburian written in the 1950s and designed to be amusing and interesting for the pupils of the day. Some of it is frankly no longer funny, if indeed it ever was, but it remains a mine of information about the school and its community in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

It is sometimes quipped that the regime in the Public Schools of the day was deliberately hard so that the boys would be prepared for life as prisoners of war. Ashcroft, writing in 1954, states with a frighteningly straight face that this was in fact the case:

"Many years ago when I visited the lower Lawrence houseroom (where the West Portico now is) and found all the boys in it absorbed in watching a boy eat a live worm. Before I arrived he had dealt with one already, after passing the hat round and collecting 9d for the feat. The one I interrupted was priced at 1s. 2d. he hadn't even the excuse of Luther who is reported to have said at the Diet of Worms: "Great Heavens, there is no other course!" However you never know what good may come out of anything. The same boy spent about six months in hiding behind the German lines, after having been captured as a parachutist and escaped from captivity: and then he had to live as best he could from what he could get from the fields. "

(h)oips

Greek is now very strong at Haileybury - last year we had something extraordinary like a third of all A Level Greek entries in the country. But how many members of the Haileybury community now remember (h)oips? It's Greek, and I can't work out how to get Blogger to let me type in Greek letters (answers in the comments please)*. It was the name for the junior pitch on XX Acre, now buried somewhere under the Sports Hall I suppose.

I had forgotten the name until I  came across it while leafing through RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury (more about that extraordinary volume another time). It is one of those bits of school slang which used to form a separate kind of language but have now largely passed into desuetude. (Words like groize and terms such as New Guv'nor also seem to have gone now.) I'm not now sure, but I think it was pronounced without the breathing - oips, not hoips.

The derivation of (h)oips was (h)oi polloi - the many -  and so you were not part of the elite, the few, the XV or the XXX, but one of the many, playing on the junior pitch. There is an explanation - which makes reference to the Haileybury usage here.
Strange in a way that in our egalitarian days the first team should still have on Terrace its dedicated pitch with its special name but the poor old (h)oi polloi just play any old where.


Update
Carole Gandon, Head of Classics, writes to correct my hyperbole - to have a third of the entries we would need the whole VI to take Greek but, she says: we do more than keep our end up Greek wise and our numbers would compare favourably with most, other than the Classical powerhouses of the likes of Winchester.